First from our region, students of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) submitted a successful tender, which means we accomplished the terms of the competition. Currently our team has 50 student members, not only from the Faculty of Architecture but from other different faculties we accomplished. Our goal is to create an innovative solar building in which we apply our architectural and technical developments.

The lights are turned on! ? The joint work of Mechatronic and Design Team achieved a milestone

When we imagined the house everything was easy to operate: a simple touch turned on the light, with smoothing the light was fading and with a subtle gesture the house became asleep. In our house there were no plastic buttons, switches, knobs, just simple, in the wall-fitting natural surfaces that guess people?s thought from a touch

During the design of the house?s user interface we cannot find appropriate for our ideas in the market so we decided to develop our own switches. In recent months, we have been complied our dream device from existing sensors, then we realized, what we planned must be built up from the beginnings. Thus, as a work of the mechatronic team a unique sensor and associated electronics was born; and with the help of the design team the prototype is ready, what matches technology and outlook.

Our goal is to develop the lighting for many occasions, mood and made suitable for most lighting conditions; meantime don?t complicate the handling, and what matters the appearance of switches? surfaces, we would like to show them as simple and clear-out as we can. Therefore, we set off towards the touch-sensitive technology and look further as well. The established system detects the touch or the closeness of hand on capacitance principle, the microcontroller central unit is able to recognize the movements of the hand and the gestures. With this technology we can get rid of the wall-protruding plastic cases; we achieved that our switch is a simple, wall-fitting surface from the most varied materials. The front panel can be made of wood, stone, glass, can be hidden under the wallpaper, or even unusual coatings are possible, such as textile or leather. To turn on the lights is enough to touch the surface; the brightness can be adjusted on the switch or even with a loose gesture in the air before the switch.

Until the creation of the final product a lot of development ahead of us, the prototype is still providing the function of an ordinary switch, but with newer and newer pieces, we will show how we can do lighting better, simplify it and make it really exciting. Because nobody has known yet, what it feels like to bring light into air with bare hands without magic wands!